How Biden Mutated into a Dove

How Biden Mutated into a Dove

Gilbert Achcar

Thus, after eight months of genocide by means of intensive bombing of densely populated Palestinian areas, which has so far claimed the lives of nearly fifty thousand people, between those dead who have been counted and those who are still under forty million tons of rubble resulting from the destruction of no less than 300,000 housing units according to UN estimates, not to mention public buildings, after all this deadly and destructive ferocity by the “Jewish State” compared to which the ferocity of the “Islamic State” looks rather modest, and after continuous efforts to facilitate this genocide by objecting to any project of ceasefire, i.e. cessation of the massacre, especially by exercising veto right at the UN Security Council, here is Biden, the proud Zionist, suddenly insisting on obtaining a ceasefire to the point of submitting a draft resolution to this effect to the UN Security Council last Monday.

So that no one may imagine that a divine revelation descended upon Biden and his administration, and that they repented of their collusion with the perpetrators of genocide, they were keen to portray their truce project, consisting of a temporary ceasefire along with an exchange of captives as a prelude to negotiations to end the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip, as if it were a project that had Israel’s approval, indeed an Israeli project, so that the blame for its failure to come into force would fall on Hamas alone. This is sheer hypocrisy, since Netanyahu has never officially announced his approval of the project, but has acted so far as if he wants to dissociate himself from it. On the other hand, the political leadership of Hamas has demonstrated shrewdness and awareness of the game in hastening to welcome the Security Council’s resolution and express its readiness to negotiate the terms of its implementation, thus returning the ball to the Zionist government’s court after the US administration tried to confine it to its own court.

This is because the Zionist government is in a state of confusion. Had Netanyahu publicly agreed to the truce project, Gantz and his group would not have decided to end their participation in the war cabinet on Sunday. They attributed their withdrawal to Netanyahu’s reluctance to accept the truce project and set conditions for ending the war that are consistent with Israeli interests and the wishes of the US godfather. The truth is that the goal of Washington’s recent initiative at the Security Council is not to pressure Hamas, but rather to pressure Netanyahu to accept the project officially and publicly. This is in the second place, but in the first place, Biden has been deploying efforts to show that important segment of US public opinion which is upset by the genocidal war waged by the Zionist state, and which constitutes an important proportion of traditional Democratic Party voters, to show them that he is serious in his efforts to stop the war.

The US administration will escalate pressure on Netanyahu to accept the temporary truce, which they all know will not last more than a few weeks (as explained last week in “Truce in Gaza and the Dilemmas faced by Netanyahu and Hamas,” 4/6/2024), and to end his reliance on the “neo-Nazis” in his government in order to accept the offer of his opponents Gantz and Lapid to form a national unity government that includes Likud, the two main opposition parties, and other Zionist groups less extreme than those of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. Whether this happens or not, Biden needs to look like a hawk that turned into a dove, in order to mitigate the protests against him that are expected to disrupt the Democratic National Convention next August (19-22) in Chicago, which is when the Democratic Party officially adopts its candidates for president and vice-president.

This is the secret of Biden’s metamorphosis from a key partner in the Zionist genocidal war to a peace advocate. While this mutation is a tribute to the importance of the protest movement against the war in the United States, we cannot ignore its opportunistic and hypocritical nature and the fact that Biden, Gantz and their entourages differ with Netanyahu on how to liquidate the Palestinian cause after they jointly perpetrated the “Second Nakba”, and not on the purpose of liquidation itself.

Translated from the Arabic original published in Al-Quds al-Arabi on 11 June 2024. Feel free to republish or publish in other languages, with mention of the source.